. Spinning .

Thank you to all who’ve offered support and understanding through this—I’m thinking that it’s not an unfamiliar place to be to those who need to write.

Basically, I can separate my sudden anxiety attack down to the following elements:

1. Lack of creative output. Although obviously I’ve been writing religiously, I don’t feel that it’s been “creative” writing. My interest and skill if any is in writing fiction. While I fully comprehend that reality must enter fiction through experience—even that which is science fiction or surrealism must be based on some factual knowledge gained in our own lives, I have always written stories about other people’s lives. Make-believe people. Not my husband, my father, my sisters, my friends—just people I’ve made up, or have lived temporarily through them. This brought me to settle upon Spinning, the weblog, as a detriment to creativity when I found that I did not want to even look at the stories that I was once so anxious to work on.

2. That said, my feeling about the previous post I mentioned wherein Ben wondered about how much of himself he chooses to put into his work became a contradiction to what I blithely told him was a necessary part of writing. Suddenly I see that I have not been creative, but merely reportive in my writing (don’t bitch about reportive—it’s the first sign of creativity I’ve had lately and I’m keeping it as a word). Back in October when I first started Spinning, many of the entries were story beginnings, or literary analysis, or at the very least, like this very series, views of the writing process. Somewhere I wandered off into too much reality, which is not my style of writing, nothing I’m good at or choose to do, and more importantly, no one cares about nor needs to know about my moods or whether or not I have a Christmas Tree.
While I do feel that something more than cursory personality traits hidden within the work is what will make Spinning more interesting reading, I need not overwhelm this journal with the person rather than the writer. There are many, many more personal journals online that are so very much better—written by people who live much more interesting lives as well as tell about them in a more humorous or touching manner.

3. If I’m to continue Spinning—which there is no doubt that I will—I will need to more closely consider what I’m posting. My self-imposed deadlines of giving you plenty to read on a daily basis should not overwhelm the basic intention of writing-creatively-fiction, both as a personal exercise in self-improvement of voice and style, as a daily discipline of practice, and with the intention of sharing the process in a way that would be entertaining and interesting to others afflicted with the obsession to write.

There have been doubts as a writer before—many, many doubts. But I suppose I’ve never been as open with them before to other people. The good thing—and newly discovered side effect—of a journal is to take a more intelligent and critical approach of understanding the writer as well as what is written. Self-psychoanalysis combined with self-critique of one’s work cannot be a bad thing.

So please forgive my sharing this last bit of myself with you, and I will strive either for a more professional writer’s journal, or rekindle the creative flame and keep it fed to bonfire proportions, and burning alongside this wooden stove of homespun journalizing

Just to clarify on the previous post that no, I did not break down in tears over my current confused state of mind regarding writing, but rather about a million other things I may not have allowed myself to cry over for many months. It’s the accumulation of little things that will get me every time.

I went to the college library and unloaded some guilt along with the unfinished books for the term paper (I’ll have to accept never really understanding the Mexican American War), went to my father’s house, brought him wood and groceries, set up his 2nd new battery jumper, cut his hair, and got back home where I finally sat down and cried.

Something’s going on, and part of it is Spinning and the part of me I’ve let you see that I’ve not let anyone but the very close to me see before. This is something akin to the question raised by Ben in a previous post which I’ll go back to once I’m more organized with this whole thing. I’m a fiction writer, not a journalist nor a diary-keeper. It’s presenting problems.

I’m not quite over displaying what I’d like to call artistically natural dramatic tragic tendencies, but I believe it to be more a simple childish tantrum and would like to mature a bit more before I get back online.

Of all days to wander onto Pedablogue and find Professor Arnzen’s post on blogging, it had to be today. Although I cannot blame him for my current crisis, as an English professor and horror fiction writer he may have created some monsters such as myself of his own. Is there a responsibility teachers must consider towards their more obsessive students? I don’t think so—as in everything else, I feel an individual’s responsibility is the sole eternal light behind obsessions, and others only light the passion.

Good Morning. And that’s about all I can say with confidence. I woke up this morning with some serious emotional problems about writing, so for all my prior boasting about the great waves of inspirational flow that probably bothered many readers, you are fully justified in nyah-nyahing me.

As soon as I can corral the ghostly thoughts (sent by Edgar, I’m sure of it!) that are racing across my brain like the wild horses of the 1800’s American plains while I’m feeling like a mule horse, I will post more here—because it’s the only thing I feel I know how to do.

Uh-oh…it’s gone. It was here in an unstoppable flow since September and now it’s dried up. Perhaps I just forgot how to write. Or maybe I’ve used it all up on this weblog—I’ve seen writers sign off weblogs with “It’s time to get down to the serious business of writing, so I am taking a hiatus from this daily journal…” and their blogs are left hanging in space with the last entry dated a year ago. Shall I check Amazon to see if their choice ended in a successful publishing venture? Do I dare want to know?

I’ve read my own stuff, read short stories from quarterly journals to inspire—no to poke forcefully back to life, but it’s not working. A story I’d been working on for quite a while because I thought it was such an improvement over my previous work somehow looks strange to me, as if it were written by someone else and I don’t have a clue where the author wants to go with it. Is it finished? Is it any good? I don’t know. It’s foreign to me now.

This blogging thing (why does that sound so much like f…ing thing?) that I’ve cheered as the greatest breakthrough for authors, is it merely sublimation? Indeed, the greatest dictionary description for sublimate is “to cause to change directly from a solid to a gas, or from a gas to a solid.” I’m finding the former rather than the latter. More on this later, I think.